All in All, Very Entertaining

Ah, July First.  The end of winter here in Dunwich and the season of heat and oppressive humidity.  Glorious!  All week the grandkids have been swimming around in the pool which mercifully opened this year without a leak in the liner.  Last year ended with two patches applied and a warning that when winter ended it might be time to replace the liner; a very expensive and difficult procedure that would tax the almost non-existent competence of our local pool professional (and I use this word extremely facetiously) to its limit and beyond.  I told Matt, the pool guy. that I would think about replacing it in September.  But I’m not sure.  I might roll the dice again in 2027.  We’ll see.

I’m off from work for the next week and a half and I’m almost as giddy as a school boy on the first day of summer.  I walked around and checked the milkweed to see if any monarch caterpillars were chewing on the leaves.  While I didn’t find any, I did see a monarch butterfly flitting around the yard and took that as a good sign.  I also haven’t seen any preying mantis egg sacs or baby mantids anywhere and am starting to believe that the mantids that I bought the last few years aren’t capable of surviving the Dunwich winter.  I’ll have to look into that.  I have seen them naturally occurring in the area but I was hoping that my seeding of the area with egg sacs would have made them more prevalent.

Camera Girl has now completely conditioned her pond fish to expect a feeding at about six in the evening after our dinner.  Tonight when she arrived at the pond the water was already in motion and when she tossed in the food pellets it reminded me of what used to happen on the old Addams Family television show when Morticia would toss a leg of lamb into the piranha tank and the fish would roil the water for a few moments and a glistening white bone would be ejected at high speed out of the tank stripped clean.  That’s kind of like what her pond looks like at feeding time.  The damn things actually make audible noise.  I wouldn’t want to be an innocent grasshopper or cricket that accidentally fell into that death trap at feeding time.  It’s slightly unnerving.

I’m currently using my push mower to cut the grass in the fields and it’s taking many hours.  I’ve been too unmotivated to change the oil on the riding mower so I’m paying for my laziness.  But I figure it’ll help me achieve my summer weight loss goal.  If nothing else I’m definitely sweating off an enormous amount of water which must be good exercise for my sweat glands.  I noticed that I was having to double cut the grass to get it right.  But then I discovered that pulling it backward over the grass did a much better job so I dragged the mower behind me backward all the time.  Of course, you can only use one arm when dragging it behind you, so I came up with a routine to alternate arms.  And that had its own subtleties.  All in all, hand mowing was very entertaining.  A good first day of summer.

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Ed Brault 

It looks like New England is getting even more heat than here in South Carolina. I do remember a few HOT summers up in Danvers, and sweltering near DC when I was in college. Here we just expect it, do the yardwork before the Sun clears the trees, and keep in the shade and A/C until dusk.
If you think your wife’s fish pond look like the Addams Family, you should see the Great Ocean Tank at the SC Aquarium. 50 species totaling 550 various sized critters from all levels of the Food Chain, roiling the waters as we toss sixty pounds of mackerel, squid, shrimp, and smelt on the surface. The sharks are polite, they know they will have a separate dining service an hour later. Our 240-pound sea turtle, on the other hand, is the Diva of the Tank, and even the feeding frenzy parts before her as she glides over for her smelt-cicles (she loves it frozen, nice and crunchy). We do NOT have divers in the water at feeding time, although we do occasionally have to go in to recover a Chum Bucket that got loose from its line.

TomD